It's time. I've been saving this one for a slow day. And here we are. It's time for flatmate stories.

People presume that I'm probably sick of them, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Years after writing Felafel I'm still fascinated by just how freaking weird people can be once they get out of home and set up a pad for themselves.

Heard tell just the other day of a young woman, desperate to escape her nutty flatmate who talks incessantly. Not just a lot. But without ceasing, ever, not even to draw breath. She must have learned the technique from a didgeridoo player.

So she's like yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap from the moment she wakes up until, apparently, 10 at night when it's sleepy bo-bo time and woe-be-tide any of my informant's visitors who want to chat after 10 because SHUT THE HELL UP IT'S BED TIME!!!!!!

I like that story. I like it a lot because I'm not living with her.

Same way I loved the news item last week about the young bloke in Perth got busted for a little Mission Impossible scheme when the camera he'd allegedly hidden in his sexy female flatmate's teddy-bear, so he could scope her out in her jim-jams, or not, was discovered by the hottie in question.

Now, that never actually happened to me. Because I'm not that hot, I guess, and any flatmate who needed to eyeball some hairy JB toolage needed only to ask and I'd adjust my bathrobe while stretched out on the brown couch. Anything for a little house harmony.

But it's good to know it goes on. Possibly right now, in your own home.

So today, I'm not telling the stories. You are. Amuse me with what's been happening in the land of share housing since I fled with my tail between my legs nearly ten years ago.

I have this theory that there are only a limited number of flatmate stories. The archetypes. Crazy Flatmate. Dirty Flatmate. Evil Flatmate. And Flatmates Who Had Sex When They Shouldn't Have. Pretty much every story I've heard orbits around those poles at a greater or lesser distance.

They're a rough-headed bunch, aren't they, the lost men of HMAS Sydney? Tattoos, big ears, some gappy teeth, frightful hair, more Brylcreem than is really necessary and, despite the smiles and good cheer, you can in see in some of the longer faces and thinner frames the gaunt, hungry years of the Great Depression not long passed.

I'm guessing things didn't smell too nice below decks either. There'd have been some terrible BO and corned beef farts down there. Possibly somebody's cut one just before this photo was taken, leading to all the cheeky grins and genuine mirth.

If I had to lay money, I'd bet that Chesty Bond character mid-frame on the right who's about to drink from the big white mug would be your culprit. He looks good for it, the sly devil.

I imagine he was missed by whoever he left behind. Because they all left people behind when the Sydney went down with all hands on 19 November, 1941.

For years their fate was a mystery and their final resting place unknown, but the recent discovery of both Sydney and her killer, the Kormoran, cleared away some of the fog which had shrouded the death of these men for so long.

The Kormoran, heavily armed but disguised as a civilian ship, let fly at Sydney when she strayed too close, raking her with canon fire and torpedo strikes. It seems that her bow was torn off in the battle, probably explaining why so few made it to the boats, and dooming the crew as she plummeted to the floor of the Indian Ocean.

The Kormoran too was destroyed, taken down by an opponent who refused to give in, even when the Sydney's bridge was destroyed and all the ship's command along with it.

These men above, and their mates, 645 of them, fought on as the seas closed over them. It sounds heroic, and it was. But as Shakespeare knew "there are few die well that die in a battle". Some went swearing, some crying, some feared for their wives left poor behind them, and "some upon their children rawly left".

Tomorrow, we are all their children.

For as rough and different and even ugly as all those old warriors could be, every breath we take is owed to them. To what they did. And what they gave up.

If I was gonna get caught up in a sex scandal, my only wish would be that I could do so as well as CNN's Richard Quest.

You've got to admire a public figure who doesn't just get himself caught out with some drugs, or a kinky sex toy, or a complicated bit of genital gift wrapping, but who instead goes for gold by getting busted in public, with his drugs, AND his sex toy (please God let it be an oversized fluorescent break dancing dildo) AND the above mentioned tackle rigging, which appears to have involved a cord of unspecified length and thickness (a bungee, perhaps?), some knots they don't teach you in Boy Scouts - well, maybe they do, but they shouldn't - and of course the Questacular sporting goods.

All he needed to round out the scene was a couple of Bangkok lady boys, a lesbian midget and Jerry Springer.

The question now arises, however, how best to respond to one's spot of bother in the full glare of global publicity. Were you a former president of Russia, I guess you could simply shut down any media organization which reported you'd dumped your wife for a pubescent gymnast with a startling ability to fashion a fetching pair of earrings out of her shapely ankles. If you were one of any number of disgraced American governators or legislators or former gimlet-eyed prosecutors, you'd be forced to ritually humiliate your family by dragging them in front of a presser for the standard mea culpa and resignation speech.

But I'm kinda interested to know what would you yourselves do, my little instruments? Slink away, hideously embarrassed, disappearing forever to pursue life as a galley slave on a Peruvian tooth fish poacher?

I wouldn't.

I think I would take my direction from Paris Hilton, or Pamela Anderson, or Max Moseley that F1 racing car guy in the UK who got video-sprung in a so-called 'Nazi-style' orgy with a giggle of call girls. Although, I have to wonder, after repeated inspection of the leaked footage, just what 'Nazi-style' elements were actually involved? Did they spank each other with swagger sticks and then invade a make-believe Poland fashioned out of couch cushions on the apartment floor? Apart from Max speaking in German to a couple of the hookers, who were German, so it was only good manners, I don't see the Hitler connection.

Anyway, I quite like Moseley's response, when caught with his Panzers down (sorry, couldn't resist). Rather than sheepishly fading away he's decided to go after the blighters who ruined a perfectly good romp, by suing them for invading his privacy. And he's got a point; a six-hour of sesh of sado-masochistic rumpy-pumpy really is the sort of thing that should stay strictly between friends.

Likewise, were I Richard Quest, I wouldn't be taking an extended sabbatical, or having some time off to consider my position. I'd be fronting up at CNN same as always, with only a small novelty lapel button to acknowledge my recent difficulties - a sterling silver clitoris or tastefully bejewelled butt plug, let's say - but otherwise sporting naught but a boyish grin.

Aside from indiscretions involving minors and farm animals, there's almost nothing you can't shrug off with a boyish grin.

Every teenage girl should have at least one gay boyfriend, someone who dresses as well as they do, who can intelligently discuss haircare products and nail management, and who will gladly run with them, all shrieking and giddy, to the stocktake sales twice a year, should their ultimately doomed relationship last that long.

A non-threatening gay boyfriend is an excellent way for a young lady to debut on the dating scene and when the inevitable face-facts moment finally arrives, everyone can move on knowing that it was never really meant to be, and at least they had some nice shopping together and caught up on all of Jennifer Aniston's DVD releases.

And that is the only argument I can think of in support of Churchie's ban on some of its gay students bringing a boyfriend to the school dance. If it means some young girl somewhere misses out on the all important gay boyfriend rite of passage, that really would be a shame.

Other than that, the ban is absurd and hurtful and, let's face it, homo-fracking-phobic.

How much courage would it take for a teenage boy at a school like Churchie to step out and let everyone know that he was gay and partnered up and not interested in being jammed back into the closet to indulge the bigoted sensibilities of the school, its culture, their classmates, whoever?

I don't know who these guys are, but I dips me lid to 'em.

The school, on the other hand, needs to wake to up to itself. It's good that it's agreed to engage in a "debate" on the issue, but that debate would want to be free and fair and not just an exercise in PR. A lot of comment has been aired, reasonably enough, about the damage to gay teens by institutionalised fear and loathing and the endorsement of hatred inherent in policies such as this ban.

All true.

But think of the damage it does to those straight kids who get the message loud and clear that not only is being gay shameful, it's okay for them to think less of, to exclude and to discriminate against anyone they meet whose sexuality doesn't mirror their own.

Fostering that sort of attitude does not prepare children well for living in the modern world. Quite the opposite. School boys have been jailed for murder in NSW because they'd been raised to think of gay men as hateful and of gay bashing as a legitimate expression of that hatred.

Such attitudes serve no useful purpose. They serve only the needs of bigotry and if private schools like Churchie insist on holding fast to them, it might well be time to look at whether the exclusions religious schools have secured for themselves from anti-discrimination law are good public policy. For while all the attention is currently focused on that one school, they are not alone.

First my invite to the Ruddbot's Big Brain Love In goes missing, and then yesterday I sat, waiting by the phone all day for a call from Cap'n Bligh (Yarhaaaarrr) to suss out my availability to step up and fill Guvnor Bryce's vice regal stilettos.

And I'm still waiting, mon capitaine!!!!!!

Personally I rather think I'd be the very model of a modern governator.

All of my scandals have already been exposed, by myself, for both fun and profit. Or by Des Houghton, because he's jealous.

I did inhale. In fact I mulled up, packed and fired up the billy. There can be no possibility of my tenure being cut short by the inconvenient exposure of my frequent visitations to strip clubs, titty bars or low-to-medium priced bordellos.

Been there, done that, wrote it up and sent the invoice.

And as a white, middle class male, I feel I have certain inalienable characteristics well suiting me for ascent to supreme executive power. There's my whiteness. My middle classness. And my willy.

It's been more than enough for every bloke that ever went before me and on equal opportunity grounds I now lodge my application for the gig on the basis that it's my turn and I'll feel very alienated and marginalised if I don't get the roller and the big mansion on top of the hill.

Guvnor Quentin was a nice chick, but I don't think I need to point out that she came empty-handed in the willy department, and so now to paraphrase Monty Burns, it would be nice for once, to let the rich white man have some control.

As your new God - sorry governator - I promise to open the grounds of my mansion once a year and roll out the slip-n-slide, which I will personally moisten with my own, generous water allowance, so that the poor children of the colony might enjoy a dangerous but thrilling ride down MacGregor Terrace.

I further promise that the leftovers from my many Devonshire teas will be left out each day at the gates on Fernberg Road for the benefit of the indigent.

Come on, keep it down, a bit of shush, everyone. Are we all here? Havock, Moko, leave the gun racks alone. Everyone else, grab a beer and a milk crate. Oh, and thank Abe for the snags, he made 'em with extra salty offal this week.

No, not that fridge, Guru. That's Flinthart's banana beer. You don't wanna go there. Not with the windows closed.

Come on, a bit of shush, I said.

Thank you. Now, listen up ... I think they're onto us.

No, sit down, Flinthart! It's not Mr Plod. I plugged the gro-lights into the neighbour's power supply and covered the extension cord with some old sacks and newspapers. There's no way those chumps could suspect anything. They think I'm growing Thai basil out here.

Virty! Don't touch that. It's still curing, dude.

Barnes, put down the chainsaw. The zombiepocalypse hasn't started yet.

No. This is worse. Much worse.

It's the chicks.

No, Rhino, not the strippers. They're still booked.

No, Barnes, not zombie strippers.

It's those fracking girlymen at the Bureau of Big Numbers. They've been stirring up the chicks again with one of those dumbarse surveys of theirs. Yeah, that's right, the whole cult of busyness thing.

Again.

They reckon we're still not doing enough around the house.

I mean, come on, you guys promised you'd at least pretend to make an effort after the last one. You know what the ladies are like every time one of these frackin' domestic survey things comes out. They get themselves all worked up like that Irvine chick and before you know it we're getting kicked off the couch or dragged back from the pub and handed a frackin' vacuum cleaner or some stinky unchanged infant or something. Man, I'm tellin' you, even the Bunnies are givin' me grief about it. Right now they're back up at the Grotto, refusing to buff the hovercraft with their little cottontails. No, Moko, they don't need any supervision.

One of them even left a big bag of soiled bunny ears in a sack by the batpole down to the Lair this morning. Told me 3000 years of patriarchy was enough, and that I'd have to do my own fracking laundry from now on.

What? Nah, it's alright. They're Bunnies. They got short attention spans. One of them'll come through and do it later.

But the problem is they're not all bunnies. No, really, Rhino, they're not. I checked. I dunno where all these demanding she-monsters came from either - no, Luke, it wasn't an ALP plot, I think - but while we were off at the pub a lot of scary fracking chicks turned up and I don't think they're going away anytime soon.

[Interjections from the floor]

Well I don't know what we're gonna do, fellas. They got this report. They've rolled up it into a really tight little whacking club, and I suspect they're gonna go upside our heads with it.

It'll be like the The Great You Don't Express Your Feelings Or Make An Effort For Me Crisis of the 1990s.

I know, I know, I thought we'd faked 'em out on that one with the whole metrosexual scam, too. Oh, and a vote of thanks to our gay brothers for all their help there. We owe you one, fellas. What's that? No, we're not gonna pretend to be gay now, that's wasn't the deal. We'll ... uh ... we'll ... uhm ... hey look here! I got a perfume sampler from the latest GQ, have a sniff of that bad boy! It's fabulous!

Yeah, yeah, take it outside. You can't really appreciate the, uh, exquisite, uh, thingyness of it in here.

They gone?

Okay, who let all the friends of Dorothy in here?

Well I don't care if the Army takes them now, this is a closed session. You know the only reason we even registered in that bloody survey is because of those guys. If the Bureau ever thinks to separate out the poofs from the rest of us ... well I don't reckon we'd be troubling the scorers in the domestic duties survey at all would we?

So, are we agreed? Until this blows over we'll at least go through the motions of helping out. It won't be all bad and it won't last, I promise you. The first time you wash their coloureds with the whites you'll get banned from the laundry again until the next survey.

What is it with the Labor Party and their whole control freak routine?

Used to be that the conservatives had a lock on the punishing and straightening vote, but two state ALP governments, our own and NSW's, have been toying with the idea of jailing parents who don't measure up to their idea of picket fence perfection.

For sure, there are plenty of people out, sprinkling their DNA around, who really should think about whether their large shallow gene pool needs to spread any further.

But I would have thought that Premier Yammerer down in Sydney and Cap'n Bligh (Yahaaar!) up here were probably pushing the panic button a tad too enthusiastically.

The Yammerer's threat to imprison the parents of kids who wag school had all the hall marks of the low farce that Bob Carr made such a staple of his long running stand up routine. (Remember his War on Baseball Caps Worn Backwards? Now that was champagne comedy).

But Cap'n Bligh (Yahaaar!) totally owned the dumbarse vote with this week's plan to send errant parents off to one of her tropical gulags for up three years, for leaving the little one's watching TV while the oldies pop out to the shop for a packet of ciggies.

The delicious irony of this vote catcher is that many of the mouth-breathing idiots who'd support it are just as likely to forget themselves a few days later, popping the kids down in front of Scooby Doo while they nip off to the shops, or around to the rubbidy for a quick one, before spending the next three years playing pick-up-the-soap in one of our many, fine correctional facilities.

You have to wonder who'll look after their kids then, don't you?

The state perhaps?

Because they've done such a bang up job in the past, haven't they.

Indeed, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this new law isn't such a bad idea after all; it just needs a little tweak.

Like making Ministers of the Crown and Premiers of Her Majesty's colonial relics responsible for the children in their care as state wards, or even school students, as they insist everyone else should be.

How about it, Cap'n? Are you confident your gubbermint is discharging its duty of care well enough to keep you out of the pen?

I can think of a couple of thousand school kids, teachers and parents up in the deep north who'd disagree, and who could probably marshal enough evidence against you from their mouldy, decaying class rooms to make the application of these fabulous new laws very interesting, as long as they applied to bad parents and dead beat demagogues with equal severity.

I have a confession to make. I will be unfaithful this weekend. I will dally with my mistress, a dark fiery temptress whom I have sworn off before, for the sake of my family and public standing. But I can't help myself. When she beckons I must hurry to be with her, to roll in her heady scent, to lick my trembling lips in anticipation of what they might soon taste.

Her name is curry. And she has made me her slave.

Oh don't you judge me!

Yes, I am weak and worthless. Yes, I have promised countless times not to stink up hearth and home with the presence of this brazen interloper. I know how much everyone else hates her. Yes, hates her and what she does to me. The sweating brow. The quivering bowels. The noxious gas in the dead man's hour.

But I ask you, what man could resist when left unsupervised for a whole weekend?

Not one, I tell you!

Not one!

Because curry is to men as water is to fish and air to the birds. It is our natural medium, a life giving ether, that element essence without which our lives are not just meaningless but impossible.

A friend I have, whose relationship recently ended. A traumatic affair, but salved by the presence of the enormous vindaloo pot now bubbling away permanently in his kitchen.

My own heart, broken many years ago it was, but binded up and healed by lashings of lamb korma and dark, malty stout.

A faithless partner, an uncaring world, or just an uncomfortably empty tum-tum. Curry is the answer. Indian curry to be precise, in all of its myriad forms, for although the Thais in particular have a way with our old paramour, I don't believe anyone but the inhabitants of the subcontinent have raised the worship and the art and miracle of curry to such a refined level. Although I do love the occasional eye watering rendang as a mere dilliance.

Why?

I do not know. I have not the slightest idea why men en masse are drawn to curry in a way they are not drawn to pasta or potatoes, both of which are admirable embellishments to any palate, but hardly worthy of obsession (unless one is Italian, of course, in which case one knows no better. Even the Irish are coming around to the delights of the curry leaf.)

So yes, I shall be unleashed this weekend. Off the chain and on the prowl for the sort of spicy shenanigans that would rock the socks off even Eliot Spitzer.

The hyper rich, criminally insane bankers, traders and dead-eyed parasites who'll be lining up like scabrous junkies over the next few years, holding their hands out, expecting you, the mug punter, to make good their losses in the markets. That's who.

And you know the best bit?

You got no choice but to pay up, unless you want to see what a $2000 trillion world economy looks like when it collapses on itself like a super massive black hole.

My colleague Paul Sheehan yesterday parlayed a great quote on this breathtaking shake down from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor of London's Daily Telegraph.

"Put a clothes peg on your nose," wrote the hyphen. "The moral stench of bailouts for the uber-rich will be sickening.

"None of us wants to pay a farthing to rescue the bankers and assorted debt pimps who got us into this financial mess, and in doing so exposed our societies to such harm ... Yet we must forbear. It was such sentiments that turned the 1930 recession into [the Depression]."

What got Sheehen and the hyphen so hyped up? The prospect, narrowly averted for now, of an honest to goddamned 1930s-style economic holocaust, all because a jabbering army of greedheads in hand-stitched suits decided that prudent risk management wasn't necessary when you had $2000 trillion to throw in the air like a cartoon pirate.

You may have heard of the big US bank Bear Stearns, which almost went belly up recently, saved only by the taxes taken from the wallets of hundreds of millions of average Americans, pumping gas, flipping burgers, or punching a till at the local mall, where the genius bizoids at the top of the Bear Stearns food chain would never ever, of course, have deigned to be seen.

The Bear had to be bailed out by Joe and Susie Sixpack, because the greedy carnivore had got itself entangled in up to $500 trillion worth of bad bets on the market.

If it had gone down, we all would have gone down. (Remember that discussion we had last week about how big a pile of money $1 trillion actually is, in the context of the $6 trillion we're gonna blow in Iraq? Well, $500 trillion makes a pile just over 83 times bigger.)

Naturally, if Joe and Susie wandered into a casino and punted $500 trillion they didn't have, on a dumb arse bet they shouldn't have made, nobody would bail them out.

But then Joe and Susie - that is to say you, my friends - don't have the power to destroy the world economy.

So you can spend the next few years sucking up the pain on behalf of those who do.

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